 Here are some main points from Richard Barsam’s textbook “Looking at Movies.” The opening chapters discuss:  You already know some things about movies, but  Your knowledge is mostly instinctive  You probably view movies primarily as entertainment  Learning more about movies is likely to surprise you. From Professor Lisa Jadwin Ph.D. – St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY

 These are the two key elements of any narrative form, including film.  FORM: the means through which a subject is expressed.  CONTENT: the subject of an artwork

 The Wizard of Oz  The Documentary, Salesman?  Apocalypse Now?

 What expectations do you have of the following forms?  Romance  Mystery  Thriller  Fantasy  Children’s film  Instructional exercise video

 Patterns are elements that are repeated so that their meaning is expanded and intensified.

 Movies manipulate space and time in unique ways.  Movies depend on light.  Movies create the illusion of movement.

 Erwin Panofsky: “Movies give time to space and space to time” by creating the illusion of movement and the illusion of the passage of time.  The audience remains fixed while the screen images move in a variety of directions.  Film creates the illusion of time passing faster or slower.

 Literally means ‘light’ ‘writing’  Began from ; proceeded through  Camera obscura  Silhouettes  Glass negatives  Series photography (Edweard Muybridge)

 Slow – intermediate - fast speed  Film stock “speed” or “exposure index” indicates the degree to which the film is sensitive to light  “Fast” film stock is used in low-light situations or to capture rapid motion that would otherwise just be a blur

 Film comes in analog and digital formats.  Traditional film is still used to shoot most movies.  Increasingly, digital film is being used in both still and motion-picture photograph  Barsam does not devote a lot of discussion to digital film technology, as it is still relatively new.

 Gauge equals width of the film  8 mm to IMAX (210mm) in width  Small-budget or intimate films are generally shot in smaller gauge stock (16-35 mm)  Big-budget or blockbuster films are generally shot on wider gauge stock (70 mm widescreen or IMAX 210mm)

 This website provides examples of a variety of optical illusions, such as motion aftereffect. x.html

 Persistence of vision (our eyes’ tendency to “hold over” gapped images)  Phi phenomenon (the illusion of movement between adjacent events)  Critical flicker fusion helps create this  Apparent motion (our eyes’ tendency to connect disparate images into a single smooth motion)

...at the movies, when you watch a character use a computer monitor, and the monitor seems constantly to flicker. Yet when you look at your own computer monitor, it doesn’t seem to flicker at all.

 Realism is the creation of scenarios that seem plausible  Anti-realism is the creation of scenarios that seem implausible (or defy the laws of physics)  Verisimilitude is the illusion that a one- or two-dimensional surface is three-dimensional and actually real

A. Plausible (realism) B. Implausible (anti-realism) C. Three-dimensional or real (verisimilar)

 Their 1895 film, “Exiting the Factory,” to which sound has been added, utilizes fixed cameras and tries to capture an everyday event.  It is on our web site robfilm.org in the narrative video tutorials.

 Action  Biography  Comedy  Fantasy  Film noir  Gangster  Horror  Melodrama  Musical  Mystery  Romance  Science fiction  Thriller  War  Western

 Which genres does Citizen Kane belong to? How does it experiment with conventions of those genres?

...when filmmakers alter generic conventions  Often they do this to meet the expectations of a changing society  What has happened to the western genre in the past two decades?

 Factual  Instructional  Documentary  Propaganda  Sometimes, as with fictional films, these sub- genres overlap or are impossible to distinguish or determine.

 How can we determine what is a documentary, what is factual, and what is propaganda?

 Animation is created through manipulating artificial characters – drawings, figures, etc. – to provide the illusion of movement and life.  Puppet animation  Clay animation (ClayMation)  Pixilation  Traditional cartoons (like a celluloid flip-book)

 Avant-garde films: style becomes subject  These films are often designed to shock or amaze viewers  They can be deliberately anti-realistic  Stream-of-consciousness is an avant-garde technique

 Films are created not by individuals, but by large teams of individuals working on special issues: photography, acting, sound, direction, editing, special effects, etc.  Traditionally the director is credited with the overall vision of a particular film. This view of film is called auteur theory (author theory).